Is Donald Trump the Manchurian Candidate?

Unlikely as it may seem, the novel cited by commentators from each side of politics as most relevant to the current US presidential contest is a bizarre spy thriller about brainwashing and incest that appeared more than half a century ago.

That sense of applicability requires some explanation.

A lurid tale of a Cold War conspiracy featuring mind manipulation and assassination, as well as sex between a mother and son, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate is an odd book that was written in strange times.

The novel was published in 1959 during the age of anxiety – as the era was dubbed by the poet W.H. Auden – when nuclear angst gripped America and fears of deep Communist infiltration could be exploited for populist political ends. It was a period when even the most outlandish popular science fiction projected fears of nuclear war and Communist infiltration in stories of extra-terrestrial alien invasion.  

Condon’s book channelled the zeitgeist with enough persuasion to prompt a Hollywood adaptation directed by John Frankenheimer that premiered in 1962 with the star billing given to Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh. For a mainstream film of its time, the movie is fairly faithful to the text, though needless to say the incest aspect was not made explicit.   

In our own age of self-directed terrorism, political fragmentation, social dislocation, endless spin and disinformation, and economic turmoil, perhaps we are reliving the nightmare of boundless suspicion and uncertainty. The Manchurian Candidate, not unlike the original James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, recreates the highly charged atmosphere of Cold War conflict in spy fiction notable for its grotesque villains, garish plots, horrific violence and overheated sex.    

In Condon’s novel, a group of US soldiers is captured by the Chinese during the Korean War and taken to Manchuria. There, with the knowledge and approval of Communist ally the Soviet Union, the American captives are brainwashed into believing that one of them is a war hero who saved his comrades. The prisoners, their minds thus reprogrammed, are then released back to the Allies.  

Awarded the Medal of Honor by Congress on the basis of the implanted memories, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, who is the member of a prominent political family, has been programmed by his Communist captors to assassinate prominent targets by remote command as a means of disrupting the political process and thus destabilising the West.

Because of his heroic status and family connections Shaw has the opportunity to get close to his targets and kill with impunity on behalf of the foreign enemy without remorse nor indeed any memory of what he does.

Shaw’s ruthlessly ambitious mother Eleanor is the wife of Senator Johnny Eslin, a prominent populist Republican senator and vice-presidential candidate whose career she is pushing. Iselin, who simply makes things up, is described as “a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”

It is only when one of Shaw’s former comrades, Marco, recovers from his brainwashing that the assassination plot is uncovered. Despite Eleanor’s apparent allegiance to the far right faction in Congress, she is in a fact a KGB agent and her son’s handler.

Shaw is awakened to his own role in the conspiracy by Marco, and proceeds to kills both his mother and her husband, who is his stepfather and thus despised by Shaw not least in purely personal terms. Tormented by oedipal self-loathing, Shaw, who by this stage actually has slept with Eleanor, then kills himself.                                   

The Manchurian Candidate become newsworthy following the real life assassinations of President John F Kennedy in 1963 and his younger brother Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, events which seemed to some readers to make The Manchurian Candidate seem prophetic. For its part, the film version was withdrawn from circulation following the murder of JFK.  

To the literal-minded reader, the Kennedy assassinations appeared to have followed the narrative pattern traced in the novel of a lone, utterly alienated assassin acting as the possibly unwitting though effective instrument in a much larger scheme, whether originating overseas or within American. So, was Lee Harvey Oswald, who visited Russia, made into a zombie assassin like Raymond Shaw? 

Writing in The Nation shortly after the assassination of JFK, Condon described being questioned by a South African journalist as to whether he felt any responsibility for the crime. Unsurprisingly for an author of political thrillers, Condon both claimed and disclaimed the relevance to and possible influence of his fiction on real events.

“I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel.”

Condon, a former Marine and political liberal who was an admirer of JFK, argued that the actions of Oswald, like those of his assassin character, expressed a deep seated alienation and resentment that in America could too easily find expression in violence.

“We are not, as some well-meaning European newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such toughness was required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized, thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.”

Since The Manchurian Candidate was published, the Cold War has ended though the milieu of uncertainty and suspicion that it fostered has persisted. The sheer weirdness at times of the American political scene and the prevalence of paranoid conspiracy theories – to say nothing of the epidemic of gun violence – finds expression in the Watergate scandal and in every other scandal that has been labelled “-gate”.

When the film of The Manchurian Candidate was remade in 2004 directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. The setting was shifted to the first Gulf War and the conspiracy originates not with a hostile foreign government but within what many people see as the military-industrial complex.

According to the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, Manchurian Global, the fictional corporation behind the conspiracy as depicted in the remake, is a dead ringer for Halliburton, the company that has been associated, controversially, with Vice-President Dick Cheney. So, was President George W Bush perhaps a Manchurian Candidate?

Originally in the novel the mother character Eleanor was, if the conspiracy succeeded, to have been the power behind the throne of her puppet president husband. In the 2004 film version, Shaw’s mother herself is a candidate for Vice-President rather than the spouse of one, reflecting the political advancement for women in American politics that had occurred since the 1950s. And in recognition of developments in science, the brain washing of the soldiers is effected not with Pavlovian psychological techniques but through nanotechnology.

Period details notwithstanding, The Manchurian Candidate does speak to us. If anything, today we are more ready than ever to accept that conspiracies are everywhere, and that politicians and other people who make up the one percent are depraved as well as corrupt and self-serving. In the age of social media, wholesale public distrust of the political process and democratic institutions has only spread, and, post 9/11, paranoia has become the norm. The Internet makes it easier for us to brainwash ourselves.   

Which brings us to the relevance of The Manchurian Candidate in the current presidential contest. It was author Salman Rushdie, an admirer of The Manchurian Candidate, who, in a TV panel discussion hosted by Bill Maher that was broadcast, ironically enough on September 11 last year – proposed the novel’s relevance to the current Presidential election when he suggested that Donald Trump had been put up to his quest for the Republican nomination by the Clintons.

The suggestion made perhaps not entirely seriously by Rushdie of a scheme on the part of the Clintons to set up an unelectable opponent in Hilary’s bid for the White House was taken up by other commentators, including conservative columnist James Hohmann.

Writing in The Washington Post in May this year, Hohmann informed readers that what had might have seemed a fanciful suggestion on the part of Rushdie was being taken seriously by Trump’s opponents within the Republican Party.

“Salman Rushdie floated last fall that Donald Trump is a Democratic plant whose ultimate goal is to get Hillary Clinton elected president. To many conservatives, this feels less and less facetious. The presumptive GOP nominee has spent the past few weeks doing almost everything you would do if you were trying to throw an election, from attacking a federal judge over his Mexican heritage to not building a serious ground game or actively raising the money necessary to wage a credible campaign for the presidency.”

Anyone who sees political posts on social media will be familiar with a photo showing the Clintons rejoicing at the 2005 wedding of Trump and his second wife, an event at which they were invited guests. Moreover, there have been reports that Bill Clinton encouraged Trump, who hitherto had shown no strong interest in a political career, to run for president.       

A dimension to the speculation surrounding the unlikely candidacy of Donald Trump, who has been characterised as a “post-truth” politician, was added as a result of comments he made that were seen as pro-Russian. A new parallel between the Trump campaign and The Manchurian Candidate has been put forward, though this time it comes from a Democrat perspective. Writing in Salon in August, literature professor Stephen Paul Miller argues that Trump’s apparent admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin suggests that Trump is being manipulated by the Russian government.

“Hmm. Trump’s advocacy of dismantling NATO over unpaid bills, his continuous and effusive praise of former KGB chief Vladimir Putin (amply reciprocated), his bizarre request of Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, his coming perilously close to supporting Russia’s annexing of Crimea, and his campaign’s redaction of the Republican platform plank in support of arming Ukraine against Russia can’t help but raise suspicions of a hard quid pro quo between the Trump campaign and Russian government.”

So, is Trump part of a conspiracy on the part of the Clintons or the Russians, or could it somehow be that both are operating through Trump independent of the other? To say the least, Trump has seemed to many observers an unlikely, even accidental presidential candidate. Not only has he no practical experience as a political or military leader but his critics have repeatedly pointed to his lack of understanding, much less respect, for the institutions and protocols of government and diplomacy.

In public appearances, Trump appears to have no sense of decorum, no inner monologue, and speaks the language of violence, even raising the possibility of the assassination of Hilary Clinton. Moreover, Trump has canvassed the idea that he might well lose the election because it is “rigged”.

Notoriously Trump himself has been a booster of conspiracy theories including the Obama birther movement, an advocacy which he has only recently disavowed presumably in order to seem more responsible. Did he ever really believe that President Obama was not an American citizen?        

If Trump himself is indeed the pawn in a larger conspiracy, then it may appear as though he is hiding in plain sight.   

Even the lurid sexual aspect of Condon’s novel has an echo or two in the public utterances attributed to Trump. If Bill Clinton, due to the revelations of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, introduced sex into the political conversation, then Donald Trump has pushed the boundaries of taste even further. Not only has Trump been prepared to engage in a public debate about the size of his penis, he has also, notoriously, shared on national television his apparent willingness to “date” his own daughter.

Truth, the cliché has it, is stranger than fiction. In the case of the 2016 US presidential election, the candidacy of Donald Trump has provoked comparisons with a novel from the 1950s whose strangeness has turned out to be regarded as a function of its plausibility.

Another cliché says that life imitates art, and here too The Manchurian Candidate may seem spot on. The fictional world of The Manchurian Candidate is one in which exaggerated satirical and sexual conceits are mashed up with political reality.

As Condon suggested in the essay published the wake of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, and as his brainwashed characters are forced to experience in the book, in an age of deep anxiety and political subversion by the powers that be it is no longer possible to differentiate between current events and manifestations of our most frightening paranoiac nightmares.  

No matter what the outcome of the US Presidential election in November, Richard Condon, at least in literary terms, has won a victory for the apparent germaneness to political discourse of the paranoid conspiracy thriller.

Whether he wins or loses in November, Donald Trump remains the most likely Manchurian Candidate.

Or does he?